AMD today announced the AMD Radeon R7 260, an entry-level GPUpositioned to fill in the gap between the Radeon 260X and 250 models.

The AMD Radeon R7 260 graphics card is based on AMD's Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and supports Mantle, AMD's technology aimed at enabling game developers to design games which can harness the GCN-powered cores of PCs and game consoles.

Compared to the R7 260X, which is a fully enabled Bonaire part,
the R7 260 features two less CUs, bringing the SP count down to
768 SPs and the texture unit count down to 48. Clockspeeds have
also been decreased, with 260 topping out at 1GHz for the GPU
clock and 6GHz for the memory clock. This puts theoretical
performance at around 80% of 260X in GPU-intensive applications
and 92% in memory-intensive applications.

AMD Radeon R9 270

AMD Radeon R7 260X

AMD Radeon R7 260

AMD Radeon HD 7770

Stream Processors

1280

896

768

640

Texture Units

80

56

48

40

ROPs

32

16

16

16

Core Clock

900MHz

?

?

1000MHz

Boost Clock

925MHz

1100MHz

1000MHz

N/A

Memory Clock

5.6GHz GDDR5

6.5GHz GDDR5

6GHz GDDR5

4.5GHz GDDR5

Memory Bus Width

256-bit

128-bit

128-bit

128-bit

VRAM

2GB

2GB

1GB

1GB

FP64

1/16

1/16

1/16

1/16

TrueAudio

No

Yes

Yes

No

Transistor Count

2.8B

2.08B

2.08B

1.5B

Board Power

150W

115W

95W

100W

Manufacturing Process

TSMC 28nm

TSMC 28nm

TSMC 28nm

TSMC 28nm

Architecture

GCN 1.0

GCN 1.1

GCN 1.1

GCN 1.0

GPU

Pitcairn

Bonaire

Bonaire

Cape Verde

Release Date

11/13/13

10/11/13

01/15/14

02/15/12

Price

$179

$139

$109

$159

The new card also features 1GB of VRAM versus 2GB on the 260X.

AMD's official specifications state that power consumption for
260 is 95W, down from 115W on 260X.

The 260 will launch mid-January at an MSRP of $109, according
to AMD. AT that price, it is expected to compete with NVIDIA's
GTX 650 and GTX 650 Ti models.